When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Moe Berg was included. Although he played with five major-league teams from 1923 to 1939, he was a very mediocre ball player. But Moe was regarded as the brainiest ballplayer of all time.
The answer was simple: Moe Berg was a United States spy, working undercover with the CIA. Moe spoke 15 languages – including Japanese. And he had two loves: baseball and spying. In Tokyo, garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an American diplomat being treated in St. Luke’s Hospital – the tallest building in the Japanese capital.
During World War II, Moe was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess the value to the war effort of the two groups of partisans there.
His information guided the Royal Air Force in a bombing raid to destroy that plant.
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